Sound Judgment

Television comedy has long borrowed from radio. But should commissioners be casting their nets wider, asks Ben Dowell...

When the Mighty Boosh duo successfully piloted a handful of episodes of their show The Boosh on Radio 4 in 2003, the station's comedy commissioning editor Caroline Raphael ordered a whole series in a bid to make them established performers on the network. Then they were snaffled away by television to make a series for BBC3 - good for them, but "annoying" for Raphael and the rest of the Radio 4 comedy department.

Yet radio bosses appear to be welcoming many more TV transfers by launching Happy Mondays, the first season of radio pilots funded largely by television with the firm intention of a small screen switch. In the same month that BBC3's Gavin and Stacey won the prestigious audience award at the Baftas, TV bosses are looking to radio to provide the next hit.

The 13-week pilot season will showcase an array of talent including Jon Culshaw, Stephen K Amos, Rhys Thomas and Katherine Parkinson.

The man in charge of the initiative, head of radio comedy Paul Schlesinger, won't say how much money has come from Lucy Lumsden, BBC Vision's controller of comedy commissioning. But he does say that the budget is "enough to fund 13 weeks of shows" and that radio is "considerably cheaper than piloting for TV". The aim, he adds, is to provide new material for radio but also to "plug gaps" in the television comedy schedule, especially on BBC2.

That good television shows can be seeded from good radio shows is hardly shocking stuff: Little Britain, Flight of the Conchords and Dead Ringers, as well as The Mighty Boosh, were all on Radio 2 or 4 before they were on screen. But there is a case for broadcasters to look beyond the well-worn path from comedy circuit to Edinburgh fringe, to Radio 4's 6.30pm or 11pm slots and then to television. In drawing from such a small pool of talent, are British comedy's tastemakers selling their audience short?

"My job first and foremost is to get comedy that will be enjoyed by the Radio 4 audience," says Raphael. "I think it is true to say that nine or 10 years ago, acts in Edinburgh wouldn't talk about their Radio 4 work on their posters. Now they all do. I think comedians used to see Radio 4 as for older people, and radio missed out on the Ben Elton and Young Ones generation, but that has changed now."

Radio 4 comedy is filtered through Raphael and her small team of in-house producers before being scrutinised by controller Mark Damazer. It is vital, she says, to provide a diverse range for the audience - from Count Arthur Strong to a Pam Ayres sketch show. Live performance remains a key opportunity to find new comics for Raphael as does the Edinburgh fringe, with the odd YouTube recommendation thrown in. Edinburgh is a "trade fair", she says, but not everyone agrees that it's crucial. For Schlesinger, "Edinburgh is a bit like the Christmas shopping. It shouldn't be a once a year thing, it just happens to get all the attention. "All this is going on all the year round in pubs and clubs inside and outside London," he points out.

Kenton Allen, creative head of BBC television comedy, describes how he has to cast his net as widely as possible across radio and live performance. Top-class talent is rare, he says - his team of producers "have to kiss a lot of fairly ugly comedians to find the next Omid Djalili, and he's no oil painting".

For Allen, comedy needs outlets like Radios 2 and 4 as well as the digital networks because talent needs time to develop and mature "away from the white heat of television" - and for audiences to get used to a character, say, and "find out about it and why it's funny. Channels like ITV2 and E4 are adopting the BBC model of graduating stars from digital to major terrestrial networks but the importance of digital, like radio comedy, is also the ability to give comedy longer runs," he adds.

Ideal, BBC3's sitcom about a drug dealer played by Johnny Vegas, has now run to more than 35 episodes, whereas pre-digital "the natural lifespan of series such as The Royle Family and The Office was two and possibly three series with some one-off specials". Allen, who set up the Comedy North department, where three producers are constantly "on the look out for the next Peter Kay", is also keen to develop the work of online comedians such as Adam Buxton and Alex Horne. They are, he says, "the digital pioneers, people who work in their bedrooms, writing shows and editing them and broadcasting from there".

Channel 4's head of entertainment Andrew Newman is also looking towards the day when the first major comedy star is created from the internet. In August C4 will launch three weeks of The Nightly Show, a new half-hour comedy satire written on the day it goes out. It is drawing obvious comparisons with The 11 O'Clock Show, which discovered Sacha Baron Cohen and gave viewers an early - and some say disappointing - sighting of Ricky Gervais pre-The Office. But there is pressure there too.

"We have to be quite stoic about that and not worry if people don't like it because that is the nature of working with new talent and taking creative risks," says Newman. "When you are looking for new talent you have to have a bit of a Teflon sheen about it. I have no doubt that our new nightly show will be slagged off. But I clearly remember when Channel 4 did The 11 O'Clock Show: everyone said it was shit and it didn't get great audiences, and the only bit that was popular straight out of the box was Ali G."

Newman also points out that C4 makes around five comedies a year compared with BBC television's 50 or so. And for him there are certain comedians he thinks could not have graduated via the Radio 4 route - citing the example of "less Oxbridgey types" such as Graham Norton and Harry Hill, while acknowledging that the BBC helped hone the skills of the likes of The Thick of It writer/director Armando Iannucci. And while he welcomes the work of Radio 4, he is just as keen to develop his own stars with talent initiatives such as Comedy Lab as well as The Nightly Show.

But trying out comedy is as much about diagnosing what broadcaster and audience don't want as much as what they do. For example, with Happy Mondays, Schlesinger was clear from the outset that he wasn't aiming to pilot a "sketch show that consists of random sketches written and performed by four reasonably funny middle-class white blokes".

"Of course radio can't continue being a linear medium and it's got to branch out," Schlesinger says, readily admitting while Radio 4 has provided some of television's best comedies from Goodness Gracious Me to The League Of Gentlemen, a number of stars have managed to bypass Radio 4 perfectly happily.

One comedian who was recently involved in developing a news version of the BBC panel show QI for the Warner-owned online comedy portal Comedy box.tv, acknowledges that the end goal was not making a brilliant online comedy "watched by a few thousand people" but "making something that may get taken up by one of the major broadcasters and watched by millions".